The Americas: Caught between two evils – Jacob G. Hornberger

You can’t help but feel sorry for Latin Americans. They inevitably end up with either a right-wing “capitalist” dictator or a left-wing socialist dictator. The right-wing dictator tends to favor conservative economic policies while, at the same time, using his military and intelligence goons to round up and incarcerate unpatriotic critics and socialists, torture them, and even execute or disappear them.

The left-wing dictator tends to favor socialist economic policies, which bring nothing but chaos, crisis, impoverishment, economic misery, and even starvation to the citizenry, while oftentimes also engaging in things like indefinite detention, torture, and disappearances.

The U.S.-inspired coup occurred in 1973 when the national-security branch of the Chilean government initiated a military attack on the executive branch of the government.

A good example of this phenomenon is what just happened in Brazil. After several years of suffering under the socialist regimes of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his successor Dima Rousseff, Brazilians now get to suffer under the regime of a right-wing dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who has just been elected president.

He’s a former Army captain who sings the praises of the military coup that ousted Brazil’s democratically elected left-wing government in the 1960s and installed a brutal military dictatorship in its stead. Like other right-wing military dictators, Bolsonaro endorses torture and a fierce “law-and-order” crackdown in the country.

To get a good sense of how Brazilian left-wingers are viewing what life will be like under a Bolsinaro presidency, read this article by the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald or watch this short video by Greenwald. To get a good sense of why Brazilian right-wingers are happy that Bolsonaro won the election, see this article published last week by The Foundation for........